Agreed . . . 100%
The same problem under different conditions of property relations, during
different periods of history, at different boundaries of development of the
productive forces, lend themselves to different institutional solutions. In
all instances activated human agency solves and resolves social problems
to the degree such problems are resolvable.
Sometimes one has to just stop what one is doing to solve the problem.
Bourgeois enterprise cannot and will not stop fishing on the basis of the
bourgeois commercial relation, although we can push and deliver some blows
towards this goal. Yes the lakes, ponds, oceans and all bodies of water need to
be cleaned up. Yes, supplies of fish need to be replenished but not so that
commercial fishing can continue in a widening scale.
Shane raises another theoretical and ideological question about the state
and how to characterize Soviet society in its bureaucratic attributes as
economic logic.
Several years ago and most certainly a decade ago, I would have opposed a
description of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bureaucracy as state
capitalist. Today, I do not oppose such a description, provided (a big provided)
one define the meaning of state capitalism from the standpoint of the value
relation and a strict concept of capital as a historically evolved social
relations of production.
For instance
a). when all the social force that is the power of capital is concentrated
in the hands of the state;
b). and society enacts laws that prevent the individual from converting
wealth into ownership of the means of production and the right to hire and
deploy labor;
c). when the individual and institutions are blocked from owning and
disposing of the social products;
d). when the law that is the anarchy of production and its expression in
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and decouple labor from the
production process;
when all attributes of bourgeois production are suppressed, in everything
fundamental to the society productivity infrastructure or in the production
of socially necessary means of life; the society is not being driven in its
economic impulses by the production of exchange values. Yet, one does not
necessarily have economic communism; but socialism or a form of capital
held by the state.
To the degree that the value relation still exist, primarily in
agriculture, this relationship can described as state capitalism. I do not object.
For the Soviet bureaucracy to act or behave as state capitalist can only
mean in a way that indicates the state is the supreme property holder and the
law of value still asserts itself. The communist idea - not program, is
abolition of property beginning with its last historical form as bourgeois
property.
What does it means in concrete terms for the state to be the property
holder of all the primary means of production, water ways and natural resources
of the country? What does this mean prior to the completion of the
quantitative phase of history we call the mechanization of agriculture?
None of this is to say that horrific blunders were not committed. The
source of blunders can be political expediency, bourgeois outlook and ideology,
ignorance of science, indifference to the law of long term results (social
consequence) of ones actions; theoretical frigidness or seeking political
supremacy in disregard to others; bloated state apparatus, etc. .
In America, because we are at the front of the curve of
capital/value/industrial development and because we have inherited an increasingly large
documented history of the Soviet Union; we are in a position to make new
mistakes, rather than repeating the old ones.
The odds are such that I will never completely rid myself of
anarcho-syndicalist ideology (left pole) and I can live with that. I remain anti-state
in the sense that the state should not be the property holder, in America.
Nor should the state tell anyone what to do or be charged with the
responsibility to record or monitor ones productive life. That is to say, who works
and who does not work; how many hours one works; where one works, etc.,
should not fall under any authority of the state. Non governmental bodies
should regular the deployment and flow of labor. One can go on their computer
or to the public library and locate laboring opportunity.
We are going to quickly discover we have a tremendous over supply of labor
in a communist America.
I believe the state as we have known it is going to collapse fairly rapidly
under the impact of the Third American Revolution: the American
Proletarian Revolution. The state should not own the productive forces, with maybe
the exception being water ways and physically taking over Coke and Pepsi
infrastructure. Yea, I'm obsessed about water. Purifying water to make soda
rather than clean drinking water for human beings just rub me the wrong way. I
want these guys in jail. Really. The beer producers can fall under local
control.
I do not believe we can abolish the intelligence agencies, even if we
wanted to or the armed bodies of men and women, with extra legal authority
domestically, but their task would to directed against issues like illegal
commercial enterprise like the drug trade. Not the individuals hawing drugs on
street corners, which fall under local jurisdiction but the huge capitalist
commercial networks and their protectors in government and the state
agencies themself.
And we are still going to have contradictions and huge fights over what to
eat; where to fish, how to organize teaching and all issues of botany,
biology and the general sciences. We are going to fight like hell over how many
cars and trucks to produce and whether or not America need a new sandwich
and "square butts."
Wl.
In a message dated 4/25/2009 1:17:15 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
sartesian at earthlink.net writes:
That was no capitalist calculation based on accumulation. The Soviets did
not grow the cotton in Uzbekistan for the purpose of accumulating capital
through the appropriation of exchange value. That would be the typically
capitalist calculation-- i.e. I can make a profit from growing this
cotton,
reproduce the original investment on a larger scale, aggrandize more
suprlus
labor and generate an even greater propfit so that I can accumulate
capital
and reproduce the investment again on a larger scale.............
The Soviet bureaurcracy was growing the cotton to avoid expending hard
currency on imported cotton, thus increasing its dependence on the world
market. Doesn't mean the Soviet bureaucracy handled the farming
intelligently, or that it even properly gauged the world markets and the
costs of doing business one way vs. the other-- but it, the decision, was
not determined by the need to reproduce capital vs. the need for cotton.
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